Social Networks: Web OS or BS?

And the quote of the day (really it was a week ago but i read it today) goes to one of my favorite tech geeks Mark Petrovic from his post OpenSocial: The Java of social networks, and MIPS lost.

"it’s an odd twist of events that these social networks are being termed the web OS of our time, what with applications running on them....Shouldn’t we expect more than running our apps on someone else’s platform? Isn’t this what we did back in the days of … hold on… here it comes… the mainframe?

[And it's] doing, what, again? Updating our collective Facebook status? Who would have thought that this is what would come to be understood as the great intelligence at the edge.

(note: emphasis on last sentence mine)